June 26, 2003
The Alpha and the Omega
I haven't posted to the blog for a loooong time. Here's a couple of excuses to try on for size. A) I've been heads down on work stuff, b) I've been working on a re-re-release of byte.org that includes the integration of a new blog tool or c) all of the above.There will be nothing over the next two weeks. I'm going away. To here. Drop by if you're in the neighborhood.
And while I am away, this blog will continue to rot the same way that all untended MovableType blogs do...things will continue to fall of the bottom until there is nothing left.
But of course, that doesn't matter because none of this will be here when I get back - remember? The new blog. Big surprise.
This is officially my last post to MT.
Good night Mrs. Callabash...wherever you are.
June 09, 2003
Such exuberance...
Wow..."The operator expects 1 million .la addresses to be registered over the next few years. " - DMNews on repackaging the Laotian ccTLD as a funky new generic for Los Angeleans...
That's a lot of exuberance for one article. I wish them well - don't see how they are going to make those numbers, but I wish them well.
May 25, 2003
Why EPP may save the Net??
The Register is running yet another typically clueless "article" on the state of the DNS. This time they're running with an "EPP will save the internet" angle. Anybody that's spent more than three seconds dealing with the registry/registrar model used by the ICANN sponsored gTLDs realizes that EPP is not, as they describe "...the dream ubiquitous protocol for registrant-registrar-registry information that means fast, seamless and accurate exchange of information..."One of these days someone over there is going to actual do some research before they write an article and shock the entire world. In the meantime, I'd settle for the hari kari that they swear off in the first paragraph of the dreck that they try to pass off as an article.
May 22, 2003
Touton says farewell...
I will miss having him around the process. Hopefully he stays in touch at some level. ICANN Announcement: 22 May 2003May 21, 2003
Whither Wildcards?
Hmmm...it looks like Neulevel's "experiment" has come to an end. I wonder what the conclusions were. Or even what the hypothesis was. Oh yeah - this is the DNS, no need to worry about such trivial things. We'll get what we get I suppose.Time in DC
I was in DC last week (the week before?) for about 24 hours. When I arrived I realized that I had been there quite a few times - but I had never actually seen any of the landmarks that gives the political heart of America its character. I knew that in order to make my 9:30 flight that I should be at the airport at least 45 minutes before it left. That would give me exactly two hours to check-out, eat breakfast and go on a walkabout if I got out of the room by 6:00 (including travel time to the airport).
So I did exactly that. I didn't get to see as much of DC as I wanted to - a few blocks of Capitol Hill - but I did walk away with a really good idea of what makes America tick.
And I even felt a little bit patriotic.
On the Use of Consultation
Brett notes that Verisign's Scott Hollenbeck pointed out that Verisign is hardly the first registry to monkey with the behavior of the DNS1 "There are at least 11 TLDs that have been using DNS wildcards for quite some time to offer either domain registration services or to provide web navigation assistance." [icann.Blog]
This is all fine and dandy, but Scott, and therefore likely Verisign, has missed the real point.
Presumably each of the registry managers for each of the TLDs that Scott points to has consulted with their relevant communities and together, they have determined that breaking the DNS like this is appropriate. If the citizens of Tuvalu, Niue or the museum curators of the world wish to permit this technical characteristic of their TLD, then who am I to say they shouldn't.
Everybody has the right to break their own stuff.
The problem is thought that neither Verisign nor Neulevel engaged in any sort of consultation with the members of their respective communities. I for one think that using wildcards in this manner is a terribly bad way to run a namespace - especially one as important as .com. Thankfully, these hacks only exist in a relatively limited segment of the namespace - Neulevel's dotBIZ and Verisign's IDNs. Regardless, neither Verisign nor Neulevel are in a position to be breaking *my* stuff without asking me, or you, or you, and yes, you too.
No one really knows what the longer-term technical and social impact of this change will be. We do have enough information to guess what today's political implications are. Registries need to start consulting with their communities and stop arbitrarily implementing "features" that fundamentally change the way things should work.
1Notwithstanding the fact that Verisign is actually the registry operator for a number of the TLDs that Scott points to as precedents.May 12, 2003
Legislative Dis-assembly
The debate concerned allegations of contempt for the legislature made by the provincial opposition. Apparently they didn't like the fact that a recent budget was unveiled at a press conference instead of in the legislature.
During the debate, John O'Toole, a government MPP, decided to lay these charges to rest with a heartfelt gesture.
And then he denied it. "There were a lot of things happening at that time, and I would not say I did that," O'Toole told reporters.
And then he came clean. It wasn't an overt thing I did," O'Toole replied. "But I do apologize."
(Its a good thing he wasn't caught in bed with someone's wife. "Sorry pal, it wasn't overt, but...)
When asked if this was a new pre-election tactic, House Leader, Chris Stockwell clarified the intention of O'Toole's actions by stating that ""No, its clearly not part of a strategy, to tell our guys to flip people the bird and come out and lie about it,"
Only in Canada eh? Pity.
CTV online has the entire scoop...
May 11, 2003
Musings on The Changing Computing Experience
I have more storage space devoted to image files now (~10gb) than I had devoted to all file types in 1993 (120mb). In 1993, I had the equivalent of 10gb of images filed away in shoeboxes in my closet. Today, these same images go from the CCD in my camera, get stored on the removable flash memory card and eventually copied to my hard drive.(And come to think of it, the camera I'm using now has more on-board storage with its meagre little flash 128mb card than the 486 class PC with its 120mb hard drive that I was using in 1993.)
Continue reading "Musings on The Changing Computing Experience"
May 07, 2003
Worse than Dave?
Dave asks "So what's worse than a rich guy who creates format protocols that are sticky, has a high flow weblog, and a fellowship at Harvard?"A good looking rich guy who...
Ba-dum bum. I'm here all week, try the veal.
Client Service
From a utility perspective, I can't believe how poorly "mail" has been handled.Someone needs to step up to the plate and solve some very basic problems.
They call email "the killer app". It manages to kill my productivity on a regular basis, but other than the basic function of shipping memo's back and forth really quickly, I'm not bowled over by the fit and finish in any of the products out there. There's a lot of ground that needs to be covered before mail is really useable and useful.
Ripped Off (update)....
A few of you have written to find out what happened with the copyright problem that I ran into yesterday.I'm please to note that the semi-pleasant request actually yielded unexpected, but positive results. Within a few hours, the images had been removed from the web with other, presumably, licensed ones taking their place.
There were a few of you that wanted to hear more - I'm not talking. Things were worked out quickly and efficiently so there's no need to throw anything further into the water/onto the fire (whatever...).
I am left wondering where DRM for individuals will come from. I would love a way to protect my intellectual property at a cost that I can afford. Too much of the intellectual property discussion focuses on the rights of big business - what about little old me?
Ripped off...
Why do some people continue to equate "ease of access to content" with "freedom to steal content"?I'm kind of pissed that someone has taken it upon themselves to steal a whole bunch of images from one of my galleries without my permission (expressed or implied) and used them on another website without even a passing nod in my direction.
I've already sent off a semi-polite request that the images be removed from the website in question. I wonder whether or not I will have to resort to the poor-man's DRM - public embarassment.
April 28, 2003
What is Ross Reading?
Occassionally I'll get an email asking me what blogs I read on a regular basis. To be honest, it varies based on the amount of time I have available. I am interested in everything in my blogroll - so there's a quick indication right off the bat.I also have my Newzcrawler feeds backed up onto a public directory here on byte.org - you can point your aggregator at the most recent .ocs file in my feeds directory and synchronize what I'm reading with what you're reading.
If you know of any other bloggers that maintain their own blogroll directories, let me know. I'm not OPML capable, but any other pointers would be appreciated.
April 27, 2003
Another one...
Kevin Murphy is blogging now too...he's been quiet about this one. Wonder if Orlowski knows.Kev chose blogger as well...
April 26, 2003
SARs Reporting Discrepancies
There's not a lot of agreement with the WHO travel warning for Toronto - at least not in Toronto. Not being a medical professional means that I can only guess who is doing the right thing here. And of course, the standard rules apply - I can't trust the media's take on this important story, the local politicians are weasels and the national politicians are all liars1.
So I turned to the one place I knew I could get the right answers.
No, not the street corner - that stopped working a long time ago. The internet (now there's a source of perenially impeachable facts).
I figured that the best way to determine whether this he-said/she-said was rooted in biology or politics was to take a look at the number of cases of SARS reported by each country.
Off to the WHO.
China: 4500+
US: 41
UK: 6
Canada: 142
These numbers were very clear on two points, 1) China has a serious problem on their hands and 2) these aren't the same numbers that the Canadian news media is reporting.
Off to the Health Canada Website. Canada: 345 cases???? The CDC...US: 254 cases??? UKPHLS...6 cases in the entire UK...
I stopped poking around when I got to the UK numbers because it appears that the only numbers that are out of whack are the ones that matter.
What's with that?
I don't have any answers except to note that some of the resources (none of those above) I checked during my research indicated that there were 101 different ways to report a SARs case. Its seems that WHO counts differently than the CDC or Health Canada. Disturbingly, the difference is enough that the numbers are two-fold wrong for Canada and six-fold wrong for the United States.
I sincerely hope that my neighbors to the south are watching their own CDC numbers and not those of the WHO. I'm convinced that if Canada was paying attention to the WHO that we would have lost control of this disease a long time ago. Like I mentioned in my last SARsblog, 'tis definitely better to be safe than quarantined.
1I pay attention to far too many people that grew up in the sixties. What did you expect - warmth, trust and respect for the man? Not this cat.
People Pics from Rio
As promised, here are a few shots of the various ICANNers in attendance at the recent ICANN meeting in Rio.
If anyone is wondering, Alan wasn't able to fit her in his suitcase. And not for lack of effort.
More ICANNosphere Bloggers...
Both Heather Carle and Esther Dyson started blogging this month.And they both chose Blogger...
Now if I could just find a few more good xSP bloggers I would be a happy chap.
Blogging is Too Difficult
I've come to the conclusion that blogging is too difficult. And, unless something drastically changes, its never going to be more than a content management system for nerds and technophiles (like me) that want to use overly complicated software to keep track of their online diary.
Don't get me wrong, the tools are all great - MovableType, Radio, w.Bloggar, Newzcrawler...etc.
But they're *hard*.
For instance, the way that bloggers look at templates is a bit screwed. Typical users think of templates as pre-packaged goodness that will make whatever it is they are working on, look better. Blog templates are slightly different. They are pre-packaged, but in a different way. Its almost as if everyone that has every designed a blog tool or a blog template has decided, "Well, this should do them to start, but they really should know HTML to do anything fancier." - Like changing the background color, adding a logo or changing the font.
Adding outbound links or pictures to blog entries are just as poorly tended to. Both require users to get under the hood and explicitly do this, that and the other thing before the link or picture will show up on the web.
Ungoodness.
Everything that the old Userweb suffered from (remember "home pages") has been carried over into the new Userweb. Yuck. I still need to upload "pages" to "servers" by wrestling with "FTP", or worse, some poorly designed abstraction that is supposed to do it automatically for me, but requires me to know all sorts of things that I don't. Cascading Style-Sheets? Ummm...
exumel arpeecee? Hunh?
Like Winer said, "Pfui."
This is all very wrong. A Big design gap. Toolmakers need to stop building tools for me and start building them for my dad. And the challenge doesn't stop there. We also need to figure out better ways of explaining our metaphors and primitives.
The term "trackback" is probably the best example of this. No one really knows how and why this concept matters. I'm sure it has great utility otherwise it probably wouldn't have emerged as a feature. Problem is, we've done a shitty job of explaining what its true value is - why it matters to those that should be using it.
Until and unless the features get more appropriate for everyday users and the real value proposition is dragged out of the technical mud, the blogoshere is destined to become a curious footnote in the development of the web.
April 25, 2003
Grokster, StreamCast Prevail - RIAA Unbowed
"This is not the end, but it sends a very strong message to the technology community that the court understands the risk to innovation."
- Fred von Lohmann, on Grokster/Streamcast Decision,
April 25, 2003
FCC Ruling On UNE-P Not All Bad
I've posted another screed over at The Farm. From my perspective, I don't think the FCC got it right, but they didn't get it all wrong either. And its certainly not all bad for small ISPs. At some point, I'd love to do, or read, a compare and contrast between the Canadian and US regulatory differences - I suspect that these decisions are leading us towards two distinctly different results in two very similar countries.On SARS
Some of you have written asking about life in the hotzone. To be quite honest, I hear more about it on the news than anywhere else in my life. It was scary for a bit - especially with people breaking their quarantines. Our Prime Minister set a great example for the rest of the country by quarantining himself in the Dominican Republic for 12 days.Favorite SARS quote: "The mayor of Toronto looks like he is going to cry every time someone asks him about [SARS]." - Craig Oliver, CTV News
Let's put it this way - everyone that works in or near a hospital is taking precautions to prevent spreading this terrible disease. On the other hand, I didn't see one face mask at any of the Toronto Maple Leaf playoff games.
I learned today that Canada's health agencies report probable and likely cases of communicable diseases lumped together as one number. This is causing some to view the Canadian outbreak as being worse than it actually is.
At this stage, over-reacting and eliminating the spread of this disease sounds better than the alternatives - as long as hysteria and politics stay out of the picture.
On the bright side of the Toronto travel ban, as Mike Bullard points out, maybe the Toronto Blue Jays might start winning some games - by forfeit.
April 24, 2003
Give me options or give me death
Paolo agrees with Dave - I still don't get it.Both of them are saying exactly the same thing. "This *thing* should work exactly *this* way because that's what makes the most sense based on my experiences" - which completely misses on of the coolest points about aggregation.
Good aggregation allows users to round up large quantities of content and deal with that content on the users own terms.
Personally, I aggregate in many different ways. My blogroll is set to aggregate publishing pings, my sidebar aggregates three very different feeds and publishes out the headlines by source (I don't want "Sidewalk Chalk" chocolate in my "World Tour" peanut butter). Newzcrawler keeps track of tens of feeds for me and stores them in nice little folders that I can deal with on a number of levels - chronologically, by source or by keyword.
There's a lot more to aggregation in my life than what happens inside of Newzcrawler (or Radio is Paolo's) and the flexibility is what I value most.
More choices, not less, provide strong value to customers. Honing in on one specific mechanism that organizes things this way or that way simply means that you are comfortable making a bet that your users will see things the same way.
I guess I just don't see it the same way.
April 23, 2003
Attention RSS Aggregator Developers: User Choice Is A Good Thing
Dave says "Aggregators should not organize news by where items came from, just present the new stuff in reverse chronologic order."I say, "Sure, but what about letting me choose?"
I prefer to use Newzcrawler in a subject oriented manner, and a source oriented manner depending on what my need-of-the-moment is. Chronological orientation is useful as well and one of the things I miss about the Radio aggregator.
Each orientation has its merits. Subject matter orientation enables my research, source orientation gives me a better sense of "relative quality that can be expected based on past experience" and chronological is a good way to spend a lazy Sunday morning getting caught up.
Problem is, most software developers are intent on telling me what the right orientation is instead of providing me with the flexibility to do what I want.
Googlediving: How to Visit Google's Last Result
Bret asks how one can navigate to the last Google listing for any particular search.The answer is simple, but not automated. Hacking the URL is the only way to do it.
First, you have to get yourself a hackable URL. Do a search for whatever you want, and scroll down to the bottom and click on any of the result pages in the Google results navigation (you know, the one that looks like this "GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOGLE"). The resultant page has a slightly different URL than the page you were just on - a URL that you can mess with fairly easily.
In this slightly different URL, you should find a key that says "start=x" where X is a positive whole number. This number will always be less than the number of non-similar entries on a given subject and (I would guess) be equally divisible by the number of entries per page that you have chosen to display - the default is ten.
Changing this number in your browser address bar will allow you to "quickly" jump to specific results pages. For instance, changing it to 100 in a result set of 200 entries, will get you halfway into the results...(yes, obviously ;)
The trick lies in guessing where the last page is. Bret noted that there were 950,000+ entries for ICANN, so presumably changing this number to 949,990 would do the trick, but natch - that just brings up an empty result set.
I decided to see if this was just a big number problem and dumped 999 in. Again, nothing. Scaling back to 500 got me something again - so I split the difference and went up to 750. No results again. I dropped back to 700, got results and then decided to increment by 10 until nothing.
In this case, the magic number is 720 - there are 727 unique entries in the GoogleDB for "ICANN" - the last of which being the Webopedia "Who's Who" bio's that start with "C" - includes Vint Cerf, ICANN's current chairman.
Personally, I can't wait to see what name the community gives to this particular activity. I vote for "Googlediving" - it needs a better last page.
April 21, 2003
Radio Users Score Big With New Metric
Mark proposes that we should start scoring Winer abuses.What do Radio users get?
I propose a +1 for each month remaining in your subscription, -1 for each month that you used MT while you waited for your subscription to run out.
Now the big question is, will this be enough to get Dave to run-up my WinerQ with some "abuse" or do I need to go further...
hmm...
April 16, 2003
Quality of Spam is Increasing
Like most, I get a lot of spam. Most of it is just bad marketers trying to pass of bad copy and make a quick buck.But not all of it.
In the past few weeks, I've received a number of messages pushing wares using copy that has actually piqued my interest. The "Marines Most Wanted" playing cards, collectible coin sets, and oh yeah, the naked personal assistant.
Each of these messages has been high quality, well priced and actually compelling. Spam is starting to look more like junk mail than anything else.
Of course, neither has ever convinced me to spend a nickle and both end up in my trash. I simply point this out so that you can share in my smug satisfaction when you delete that next well-written, well-packaged, HTML-enabled, flashy-spam, confident in the knowledge that some schmuck paid good money to have it produced.
Glossy spam makes a better *plonk* sound than the garden variety off-the-cuff crap.
April 15, 2003
One Good Reason to Deregulate Canada's Air Industry
Brett asks "Why idoes it costs more to fly from LA to Montreal than it does to fly from LA to Rio de Janeiro?"Answer: Because Canada only has one airline and they recently filed for bankruptcy protection.
Sheesh, even Aeroflot is still in the air.
Novell Cozies up to Open Source?
I continue to be amazed that Novell keeps getting mentioned in any publications at all. I'm also amazed at the fact that they are still search for something to effectively replaced NetWare. Second chances are hard to come by for sure, but its rare that a company looking for a second chance lasts as long as Novell has in search of oneApril 13, 2003
Celebrity Irreverence and National Irrelevance
The only thing stranger than a Canadian winning the Masters is the American women's team claiming top seat at the World Curling Championships. I'll guarantee that there are a bunch of people in Winnipeg wondering if its too late to get Debbie back on the cold side of the border. Strange, but well deserved in both cases.Speaking of Canada as a tourist destination, I wonder if Bush gave Jean a decent excuse when he cancelled an upcoming trip to Canada this past weekend. If he didn't, here's a few that might fit the bill...
- The Secret Service won't let me go.
- I didn't know he was going to die.
- Canada didn't give me enough notice.
- Mexico said it wasn't important anyways.
- I've already been to Canada.
- I sent Clinton to talk to him instead.
Unfortunately, the sad truth is that Chretien would pick these fibs out as lame ducks a mile away - he's already used them all (or at least as much as I needed to paraphrase in order to properly deliver the joke).
April 11, 2003
Low-bandwidth Video Conferencing Hack
Not only is this a neat hack, but I can definitely see it have some real utility for users hanging off the end of a low capacity pipe. I present to you the hasciicam!April 09, 2003
nic.nz gets spamcopped...
Hmm. It looks like we're not the only domain company thats been spamcopped recently...Businessweek picked up our end of the story this week as well.
I've said it before, I'll say it again - SpamCop is being irresponsible. Sooner or later someone is going to pick a fight with SpamCop that they won't be able to win.
Towards a simplified Basic Reference Model
At IETF-49 Rich Shockey and I had an epiphany about the OSI Reference Model. The idea we had was that the original OSI model had largely been supplanted by a slightly modified de facto stack that included two additional layers for a total of nine. We felt that there was a much easier rationalization of these nine layers that would be of tremendous benefit to the community. Shortly after the meeting, I uploaded a diagram that illustrates the the basic idea pretty succinctly.For some reason, it hasn't caught on like wildfire, but it should be shared nonetheless.
April 08, 2003
Never...
Karl blogged a Response to Ross Rader as a counter to some of my earlier remarks about whois privacy. I still don't see how or why the whois database is going to be a fertile source of leads for stalkers and child molesters - statistically, the average shopping mall is in much worse shape without any of the technical
Regardless, of this small point of disagreement, the fact is that no one is making a case why this information should be in the public domain in the first place. Are the interests of those that purport to have a need for this data more important than those that own the data in the first place?
Continue reading "Never..."
April 02, 2003
Gripe
Doc may well have stopped complaining, but I feel no similar compunction.Newzcrawler is really starting to piss me off.
From time to time, it simply decides that a good chunk of my subscriptions are really unnecessary and simply drops them. Agh.
Please fix this. Soon. Please.
Please?
March 30, 2003
Only Outlaws Will Own Routers
Brent provides a decent summary of the current state of the art in legislation from Michigan. Well done lads. This will surely make the world safe for telco's throughout the state, and soon, coming to a world near you. Continue reading "Only Outlaws Will Own Routers"The Impact of Centralized Control over e2e Networks
When I see stories like this, "MediaSavvy: The censor upstream", I cringe.The majority of internet packets careening from start point to end point will likely need to travel through the "core" of the internet. The terrible fact is that there are very few companies that control this core. Companies like Level 3, AT&T, Worldcom and the like.
Each of these companies can, if they choose to, exert some level of control over the contents of the packets that they transit for us - and in some cases, they do. While the internet infrastructure remains in the hands of these relative few, the internet community will continue to be at the mercy of The Agenda.
Continue reading "The Impact of Centralized Control over e2e Networks"
March 29, 2003
Auberbach Whois Hysterics
Karl has blogged a piece entitled "ICANN and privacy".The long and the short of it is simple. This is wrongheaded, hysterical and plain out and out "not likely to happen".
Continue reading "Auberbach Whois Hysterics"
Tourist Pics from Rio
I've uploaded a smatter of the pics that I took while in Rio. These are the tourist ones. Goofy faces and drunk people photos later. Enjoy.
This Flight Tonight - Last Blog from Brazil
"She knows, now, absolutely, hearing the white noise that is London, that Damien's theory of jet lag is correct: that her mortal soul is leagues behind her, being reeled in on some ghostly umbilical down the vanished wake of the plane that brought her here, hundreds of thousands of feet above the Atlantic. Souls can't move that quickly, and are left behind, and must be awaited, upon arrival, like lost luggage."
"Pattern Recognition" - William Gibson.
Rael is once again on the plane, acolyte in tow, slightly tanned and smiling at me as I board with only minutes to spare. Actually, I'm not sure if that was a smile or some sly acknowledgement of a secret that we share but I don't fully know about. Ira Levin indeed. Conspiracy is a welcomed friend to an idle mind.
Continue reading "This Flight Tonight - Last Blog from Brazil"March 25, 2003
Lunch with the ALAC
Took an hour or so this afternoon for salads, cokes and coffee with the At Large Advisory Committee. Discussions ranged from the role of registries and registrars to transfers policy, the impact of registrar jurisdiction on users and much more.It was time well-spent and, in my books, bodes well for the future policy direction and success of the At Large if they keep up the quality of thinking.
Now if I could just convince a few of them of the merits of my thoughts on spam control measures.
The head cold rages on. "Cold medicine" I asked the man behind the counter. I'm sure the answer was intelligible, but it wasn't a two way conversation. Sign language and double checking my purchases after the fact with the concierge worked much better than my Portugese.
March 24, 2003
gTLD BOF
Despite best efforts, nothing really new was said. At this point, I come away convinced that we might want to borrow from the Raelians and simply clone some past constructs that sort of worked. Incremental improvement instead of perfection. Hmmm...
BTW, yes, that was an Ira Levin joke. The allusion was too tempting. I'm sorry.
Registrar Constituency Meeting - PM
Our afternoon session had a slightly different tenor. Food is a wonderful drug.We kicked things off with a visit from Jennifer <bad hearing, bad hearing> from the USPTO who had wonderful things to tell us about how WIPO was going to save us from the world or from governments, or evil pirates or something.
Continue reading "Registrar Constituency Meeting - PM"
ROTD
Is Netnames looking to get into the registry business?
TLD-REGISTRY.COM
TLD-REGISTRY.NET
TLD-REGISTRY.ORG
TLDREGISTRY.COM
TLDREGISTRY.NET
TLDREGISTRY.ORG
New gTLD BOF
As Brett mentioned earlier this week there is an informal gTLD discussion forum being planned for this evening. Show up at the Horseneck Tavern at 9pm for some informal to'ing and fro'ing about new gTLDs. Should be an interesting time - a bunch of people have published papers and will be there to discuss them. I'll be there with Alan. Hopefully we will see you as well.Chinese Walls & Concrete Metrics
Got this via email today from someone who doesn't spend a lot of time in the ICANN process, but spends a lot of times dealing with the problems created by the ICANN process..."...I'll just presume that everything from NSI's retail ops to the Registry itself ultimately falls under Verisign.com the parent company...and that anything that shows a different domain is just window dressing for the public."
Historically, this wouldn't have been a bad guess. I hope its a bad guess today. Not sure anymore. The registry guys really have their act together and the registrar guys are getting a lot more involved - all good things - but is the glass-chinese wall actually an effective construct?
There's no empirical evidence that there is and there's nothing but anecdotes to support that it isn't. My hope would be that ICANN looks really closely at the model and what commends it before they perpetuate it.
Metrics Dr. Paul, metrics.